At the recommendation of someone who is very dear to me, I am currently reading The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown. The person who recommended it couldn’t praise it high enough, so I had to find out if I agree with the praise.
I’m almost a third of the way through the story and I can see why it earned praise from this special person of mine. He doesn’t normally read novels as he prefers to learn while he reads. This means he’s very much a non-fiction reader. The Da Vinci Code is right up his alley as there are huge chunks of “reference book” type information (or there has been in the portion I’ve read). Hence, he felt as if the novel was teaching him something so he enjoyed the story immensely and didn’t see it as a complete waste of his time.
I, however, find that “reference book” information to be dragging the story down. I love novels! Although some of the information is interesting (especially the stuff on PHI), I feel as if the author is trying really hard to share his research results. Hey look, I found out all this information in order to write the book and now you have to suffer reading about it too!
Honestly, from my point of view, including obvious research material with the story was a bad idea as the story is jolted and interrupted by the research. I, for one, find it difficult to become involved in what’s happening and this is generally how I measure a good story. If the same information was dealt with less obviously, I think the novel would be much better. I’m getting to the stage where I’m seriously thinking about skipping over the research sections and just reading the story. If my overall experience suffers because of it…so be it!
I’ll do a proper review when I’ve finished the book.